Dante and Beatrice?

It seems odd to me that so many responders to this question should find Dante and Beatrice such an enigma...have none of them ever been smitten in a single moment by a young girl whom they don't know, have never met, yet her looks and her bearing speak forcefully to some emotional and spiritual need in them, and she seems in her single person to embody all they want and desire.

It needn't be a sexual affection at all - it can just as easily be a revelation of spiritual realities. If it's taken no further, it's offered simply as a blessing, and the young lady concerned may never even know of it. But it has such a powerful effect, that it is not too much to say that it can change the life of the one who is smitten.

Well, perhaps those who replied have not experienced this - perhaps they're too young, as yet. But youth alone should not rule it out, and in reality does not. It is the reason why people in the public eye, and particularly those in the entertainment industry, attract the devotion of people who don't know them at all, except by their looks and their public performances.

Nowadays, it's unfortunately very easy to write off the idealisation of an older man for a young and attractive woman as something slightly perverted. But that, surely, depends entirely on how, or if, it is followed through. If the man starts pestering the girl he doesn't know, becomes a stalker, writes often to her saying things she doesn't want to hear from an unknown male admirer, bombards her with telephone calls etc., then to put it no higher, he is being selfish and inconsiderate, and failing to demonstrate rudimentary good manners towards her - which certainly doesn't suggest that he cares much for her at all.

What about the questioner? Hasn't he/she ever been carried away emotionally on seeing or meeting someone? It's hardly an uncommon human experience.

wimsey

I'll stick with Virgil -- as tour guides go, he got a lot more interesting territory to cover than little Ms Polly Pureheart did.

And there are few things more annoying than a middle-aged poet with the hots for a young woman. A young, DEAD woman at that.

Courtly love was an itchbay then, and it's still an itchbay now.

Edit:

Far from being too young to appreciate young love, I'm well past the stage of thinking that infatuation is the real deal. I've been married for 31 years, and any initial infatuation has deepened into the kind of love that endures.

I've always wondered how smitten Dante would have been had he been married to Beatrice and had to deal with mood swings, morning sickness, child rearing, and then menopause. If his love for her survived all those things, then I would concede that it was real.

But drooling over a woman that he only saw in passing? It's the stuff of poetry, but not reality.

I could, but only if Virgil got me out of the downtown before rush hour.

Eh, it was interesting, but the Inferno was more alluring to me. Human nature i guess

Not I.